The Order (19 page)

Except for a few days in
September 1972, Munich had never mattered much to the Office. Nevertheless, if only for sentimental reasons, Housekeeping
maintained a large walled villa in the bohemian quarter of Schwabing, not far from the Englischer Garten. Eli Lavon arrived
there at ten fifteen the following morning. Gloomily, he surveyed the heavy antique furnishings in the formal drawing room.

“I can't believe we're back here again.” He looked at Gabriel and frowned. “You're supposed to be on holiday.”

“Yes, I know.”

“What happened?”

“A death in the family.”

“My condolences.”

Lavon tossed his overnight bag carelessly onto a couch. He had wispy, unkempt hair and a bland, forgettable face that even the most gifted portrait artist would have struggled to capture in oil on canvas. He appeared to be one of life's downtrodden. In truth, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting a flicker of interest. He was now the chief of the Office division known as Neviot. Its operatives included surveillance artists, pickpockets, thieves, and those who specialized in planting hidden cameras and listening devices behind locked doors.

“I saw an interesting photo of you the other day. You were dressed as a priest and walking into the Vatican Secret Archives
with your friend Luigi Donati. I was only sorry I couldn't join you.” Lavon smiled. “Find anything interesting?”

“You might say that.”

Lavon raised a tiny hand. “Do tell.”

“We should probably wait until the others arrive.”

“They're on their way.
All
of them.” Lavon's lighter flared. “I assume this has something to do with the unfortunate passing of His Holiness Pope Paul
the Seventh.”

Gabriel nodded.

“I take it His Holiness did not die of natural causes.”

“No,” said Gabriel. “He did not.”

“Do we have a suspect?”

“A Catholic order based in Canton Zug.”

Lavon stared at Gabriel through a cloud of smoke. “The Order of St. Helena?”

“You've heard of them?”

“Unfortunately, I dealt with the Order in a previous life.”

During a lengthy hiatus from the Office, Lavon had run a small investigative agency in Vienna called Wartime Claims and Inquiries.
Operating on a shoestring budget, he had tracked down millions of dollars' worth of looted Holocaust assets. He left Vienna
after a bomb destroyed his office and killed two of his employees, both young women. The perpetrator, a former SS officer
named Erich Radek, had died in an Israeli prison cell. Gabriel was the one who put him there.

“It was a case involving a Viennese family named Feldman,” explained Lavon. “The patriarch was Samuel Feldman, a well-to-do
exporter of high-quality textiles. In the autumn of 1937, as storm clouds were gathering over Austria, two priests from the
Order came calling on Feldman at his apartment in the First District. One of the priests was the Order's founder, Father Ulrich
Schiller.”

“And what did Father Schiller want from Samuel Feldman?”

“Money. What else?”

“What was he offering in return?”

“Baptismal certificates. Feldman was desperate, so he gave Father Schiller a substantial sum of cash and other valuables,
including several paintings.”

“And when the Nazis rolled into Vienna in March 1938?”

“Father Schiller and the promised baptismal certificates were nowhere to be found. Feldman and most of his family were deported
to the Lublin district of Poland, where they were murdered by Einsatzgruppen. One child survived the war in hiding in Vienna,
a daughter named Isabel. She came to me after the Swiss banking scandal broke and told me the story.”

“What did you do?”

“I made an appointment to see Bishop Hans Richter, the superior general of the Order of St. Helena. We met at its medieval
priory in Menzingen. A nasty piece of work, the bishop. There were moments when I had to remind myself that I was actually
speaking to a Roman Catholic cleric. Needless to say, I left empty-handed.”

“Did you let it drop?”

“Me? Of course not. And within a year, I found four other cases of the Order soliciting donations from Jews in exchange for
promises of protection. Bishop Richter wouldn't see me again, so I turned over my material to an Italian investigative reporter
named Alessandro Ricci. He found a few more cases, including a wealthy Roman Jew who gave the Order several paintings and
valuable rare books in 1938. I'm afraid his name escapes me.”

“Emanuele Giordano.”

Lavon eyed Gabriel over the ember of his cigarette. “How is it possible you know that name?”

“I met with Alessandro Ricci last night in Rome. He told me the Order of St. Helena is planning to steal the conclave and
elect one of their members the next pope.”

“Knowing the Order, I'm sure it involves money.”

“It does.”

“Is that why they killed the pope?”

“No,” said Gabriel. “They killed him because he wanted to give me a book.”

“What kind of book?”

“Do you remember when we found the ruins of Solomon's Temple?”

Lavon absently rubbed his chest. “How could I forget?”

Gabriel smiled. “This is better.”

 

The Office, like
the Roman Catholic Church, was guided by ancient doctrine and dogma. Sacred and inviolable, it dictated that members of a
large operational team travel to their destination by different routes. The exigencies of the situation, however, required
all eight members of the team to journey to Munich on the same El Al flight. Nevertheless, they staggered their arrival at
the safe house, if only to avoid attracting unwanted attention from the neighbors.

The first to arrive was Yossi Gavish, the tweedy, British-born head of Research. He was followed by Mordecai and Oded, a pair
of all-purpose field hands, and a kid named Ilan who knew how to make the computers work. Next came Yaakov Rossman and Dina
Sarid. Yaakov was the head of Special Ops. Dina was a human database of Palestinian and Islamic terrorism who possessed an
uncanny knack for spotting connections others missed. Both spoke fluent German.

Mikhail Abramov wandered in around noon. Tall and lanky, with pale bloodless skin and eyes like glacial ice, he had immigrated
to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF's elite special operations unit. Often described
as Gabriel without a conscience, he had personally assassinated several top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar assignments on behalf of the Office, though his extraordinary talents were not limited
to the gun. A year earlier he had led a team into Tehran and stolen Iran's entire nuclear archives.

He was accompanied by Natalie Mizrahi, who also happened to be his wife. Born and educated in France, fluent in the Algerian dialect of Arabic, she had traded a promising medical career for the dangerous life of an undercover Office field agent. Her first assignment took her to Raqqa, the capital of the short-lived caliphate of the Islamic State, where she penetrated ISIS's external terrorism network. Were it not for Gabriel and Mikhail, the operation would have been her last.

Like the other members of the team, Natalie had only the vaguest idea why she had been ordered to Munich. Now, in the half-light
of the formal drawing room, she listened intently as Gabriel told the team the story of a well-deserved family vacation that
was not to be. Summoned to Rome by Archbishop Luigi Donati, he had learned that Pope Paul VII, a man who had done much to
undo the Catholic Church's terrible legacy of anti-Semitism, had died under mysterious circumstances. Though skeptical that
the Holy Father had been murdered, Gabriel had nonetheless agreed to use the resources of the Office to undertake an informal
investigation. It led him to Florence, where he witnessed the brutal killing of a missing Swiss Guard, and then to a cottage
outside Fribourg, where an unfinished letter fell from a framed picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The letter concerned a book His Holiness had discovered in the Vatican Secret Archives. A book purportedly based on the memoirs
of the Roman prefect of Judea who sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. A book that contradicted the accounts of Jesus'
death contained in the canonical Gospels, accounts that were the seedbed of two thousand years of sometimes murderous anti-Semitism.

The book was missing, but the men who took it were hiding in plain sight. They were members of a reactionary and secretive
Catholic order founded in southern Germany by a priest who found much to admire in the politics of the European far right,
especially National Socialism. The spiritual descendants of this priest, whose name was Ulrich Schiller, planned to steal
the approaching papal conclave and elect one of their own as the next supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. As chief
of the Office, Gabriel had determined that such a development would not be in the interests of the State of Israel or Europe's
1.5 million Jews. Therefore, it was his intention to help his friend Luigi Donati steal the conclave back.

To do so required undeniable proof of the Order's plot. Time was of the essence. Gabriel needed the information no later than
Thursday night, the eve of the conclave. Fortunately, he had identified two important lay members involved in the conspiracy.
One was a reclusive German industrialist named Jonas Wolf. The other was a former BfV officer named Andreas Estermann.

Estermann would be arriving at Café Adagio on the Beethovenplatz at six p.m. Wednesday. He would be expecting a Swiss intelligence
officer named Christoph Bittel. He would find the Office instead. Immediately following his abduction, he would be brought
to the Munich safe house for questioning. Gabriel decreed that the interrogation would not be a fishing expedition. Estermann
would merely sign his name to a statement the team had already prepared, a bill of particulars detailing the Order's plot
to steal the conclave. A retired professional, he would not break easily. Leverage would be required. The team would have
to find that, too. All in a span of just thirty hours.

They lodged not a word of protest and posed not a single question. Instead, they opened their laptops, established secure links to Tel Aviv, and went to work. Two hours later, as a gentle snow whitened the lawns of the Englischer Garten, they fired their first shot.

The e-mail that landed
on Andreas Estermann's phone a few seconds later appeared to have been sent by Christoph Bittel. In truth, it had been dispatched by a twenty-two-year-old MIT-educated hacker from Unit 8200 in Tel Aviv. It sat on Estermann's device for nearly twenty minutes, long enough for Gabriel to fear the worst. Finally, Estermann opened it and clicked on the attachment, a decade-old photograph of a Swiss-German gathering of spies in Bern. In doing so, he unleashed a sophisticated malware attack that instantly seized control of the phone's operating system. Within minutes, it was exporting a year's worth of e-mails, text messages, GPS data, telephone metadata, and Internet browsing history, all without Estermann's knowledge. The Unit bounced the material securely from Tel Aviv to the safe house, along with a live feed
from the phone's microphone and camera. Even Estermann's calendar entries, past and future, were theirs to peruse at will. On Wednesday evening he had a single appointment: drinks at Café Adagio, six o'clock.

Estermann's contacts contained the private mobile numbers of Bishop Hans Richter and his private secretary, Father Markus
Graf. Both succumbed to malware attacks launched by Unit 8200, as did Cardinal Camerlengo Domenico Albanese and Cardinal Archbishop
Franz von Emmerich of Vienna, the man whom the Order had selected to be the next pope.

Elsewhere in Estermann's contacts the team found evidence of the Order's astonishing reach. It was as if an electronic version
of Father Schiller's leather-bound ledger had fallen into their laps. There were private phone numbers and e-mail addresses
for Austrian chancellor Jörg Kaufmann, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Saviano, Cécile Leclerc of France's Popular Front,
Peter van der Meer of the Dutch Freedom Party, and, of course, Axel Brünner of Germany's far-right National Democrats. Analysis
of the phone's metadata revealed that Estermann and Brünner had spoken five times during the past week alone, a period that
coincided with Brünner's sudden surge in German public opinion polls.

Fortunately for the team, Estermann conducted much of his personal and professional correspondence via text message. For sensitive
communications he used a service that promised end-to-end encryption and complete privacy, a promise Unit 8200 had long ago
rendered empty. Not only was the team able to see his current texts in real time, they were able to review his deleted messages
as well.

Gabriel's name featured prominently in several exchanges, as
did Luigi Donati's. Indeed, Donati had appeared on the Order's early-warning system within hours of the Holy Father's death. The Order had been aware of Gabriel's arrival in Rome and of his presence in Florence. It had learned of his visit to Switzerland from Father Erich, the village priest from Rechthalten. The phone betrayed that Estermann had visited Switzerland as well. GPS data confirmed he spent forty-nine minutes in Café du Gothard in Fribourg on the Saturday after the Holy Father's death. Afterward, he had driven to Bonn, where he switched off the phone for a period of two hours and fifty-seven minutes.

If there was a bright spot, it was the cleanliness of Estermann's personal life. The team found no evidence of a mistress
or fondness for pornography. Estermann's consumption of news was broad but tilted decidedly to the right. Several of the German
websites he visited daily trafficked in false and misleading stories that inflamed public opinion against Muslim immigrants
and the political left. Otherwise, he had no nasty browsing habits.

But no man is perfect, and few are without at least one weakness. Estermann's, it turned out, was money. Analysis of his encrypted
text messages revealed that he was in regular contact with a certain Herr Hassler, owner of a private bank in the principality
of Liechtenstein. Analysis of Herr Hassler's records, conducted without his consent, revealed the existence of an account
in Estermann's name. The team had found numerous such accounts spread throughout the world, but the one in tiny Liechtenstein
was different.

“Estermann's wife, Johanna, is the beneficiary,” said Dina Sarid.

“What's the current balance?” asked Gabriel.

“Just north of a million and a half.”

“When was it opened?”

“About three months ago. He's made sixteen deposits. Each one was one hundred thousand euros exactly. If you ask me, he's
skimming from the payments he's making to the cardinals.”

“What about the Vatican Bank?”

“The accounts of twelve of the cardinal-electors have received large wire transfers in the last six weeks. Four were over
a million. The rest were around eight hundred thousand. All of them can be traced back to Estermann.”

But the ultimate source of the money was the secretive Munich-based conglomerate that Alessandro Ricci had described as the
Order of St. Helena Inc. Eli Lavon, the team's most experienced financial investigator, took it upon himself to penetrate
the company's defenses. They were formidable, which came as no surprise. After all, he had matched wits with the Order once
before. Twenty years ago, he had been at a distinct disadvantage. Now he had Unit 8200 in his corner, and he had Jonas Wolf.

The German businessman proved to be as elusive as the company that bore his name, beginning with the basics of his biography.
As far as Lavon could tell, Wolf had been born
some
where in Germany,
some
time during the war. He had been educated at Heidelberg University—of that, Lavon was certain—and had earned a PhD in applied
mathematics. He acquired his first company, a small chemical firm, in 1970 with money borrowed from a friend. Within ten years
he had expanded into shipping, manufacturing, and construction. And by the mid-1980s he was an extraordinarily wealthy man.

He purchased a graceful old town house in the Maxvorstadt
district of Munich and a valley high in the Obersalzberg, northeast of Berchtesgaden. It was his intention to create a baronial refuge for his family and their descendants. But when his wife and two sons were killed in a private plane crash in 1988, Wolf's mountain redoubt became his prison. Once or twice a week, weather permitting, he traveled to Wolf Group's headquarters in north Munich by helicopter. But for the most part he remained in the Obersalzberg, surrounded by his small army of bodyguards. He had not granted an interview in more than twenty years. Not since the release of an unauthorized biography that accused him of arranging the plane crash that killed his family. Reporters who tried to pry open the locked rooms of his past faced financial ruin or, in the case of a meddlesome British investigative journalist, physical violence. Wolf's involvement in the reporter's death—she was killed by a hit-and-run driver while cycling through the countryside near Devon—was much rumored but never proven.

To Eli Lavon, the story of Jonas Wolf's spectacular rise sounded too good to be true. There was, for a start, the loan Wolf
had received to purchase his first company. Lavon had a hunch, based on hard-won experience, that Wolf's lender had been a
Canton Zug–based concern known as the Order of St. Helena. Furthermore, Lavon was of the opinion—again, it was merely well-informed
conjecture—that the Wolf Group was far larger than advertised.

Because it was an entirely private company, one that had never received a single loan from a single German bank, Lavon's options for traditional financial inquiry were limited. Estermann's phone, however, opened many doors within the firm's computer network that might otherwise have remained closed, even to
the cybersleuths at Unit 8200. Shortly after eight o'clock that evening, they tunneled into Jonas Wolf's personal database and found the keys to the kingdom, a two-hundred-page document detailing the company's global holdings and the staggering income they generated.

“Two and a half billion in pure profit last year alone,” announced Lavon. “And where do you think it all goes?”

That evening the team set aside its work long enough to share a traditional family meal. Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi
were absent, however, for they dined at Café Adagio in the Beethovenplatz. It was located in the basement level of a yellow
building on the square's northwestern flank. By day it served bistro fare, but at night it was one of the neighborhood's most
popular bars. Mikhail and Natalie pronounced the food mediocre but judged the likelihood of successfully abducting a patron
to be quite high.

“Three stars on the Michelin scale,” quipped Mikhail upon their return to the safe house. “If Estermann comes to Café Adagio
alone, he leaves in the back of a van.”

The team took delivery of the vehicle in question, a Mercedes transit van, at nine the following morning, along with two Audi
A8 sedans, two BMW motor scooters, a set of false German registration plates, four Jericho .45-caliber pistols, an Uzi Pro
compact submachine gun, and a 9mm Beretta with a walnut grip.

At which point the tension in the safe house seemed to rise by several notches. As was often the case, Gabriel's mood darkened as the zero hour drew near. Mikhail reminded him that a year earlier, in a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran, a sixteen-member team had blowtorched its way into thirty-two
safes and removed several hundred computer discs and millions of pages of documents. The team had then loaded the material into a cargo truck and driven it to the shore of the Caspian Sea, where a boat had been waiting. The operation had shocked the world and proved once again that the Office could strike at will, even in the capital of its most implacable foe.

“And how many Iranians did you have to kill in order to get out of the country alive?”

“Details, details,” said Mikhail dismissively. “The point is, we can do this with our eyes closed.”

“I'd rather you do it with your eyes open. It will substantially increase our chances of success.”

By midday Gabriel had managed to convince himself that they were doomed to failure, that he would spend the rest of his life
in a German prison cell for crimes too numerous to recall, an ignoble end to a career against which all others would be measured.
Eli Lavon accurately diagnosed the source of Gabriel's despair, for he was suffering from the same malady. It was Munich,
thought Lavon. And it was the book.

It was never far from their thoughts, especially Lavon's. There was not one member of the team whose life had not been altered
by the longest hatred. Nearly all had lost relatives to the fires of the Holocaust. Some had been born only because one member
of a family had found the will to survive. Like Isabel Feldman, the only surviving child of Samuel Feldman, who handed over
a small fortune in cash and valuables to the Order of St. Helena in exchange for false baptismal certificates and false promises
of protection.

Another such woman was Irene Frankel. Born in Berlin, she was deported to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. Her parents
were gassed upon arrival, but Irene Frankel left Auschwitz on the Death March in January 1945. She arrived in the new State of Israel in 1948. There she met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had escaped to Palestine before the war. In Germany his name had been Greenberg, but in Israel he had taken the name Allon. After marrying, they vowed to have six children, one for each million murdered, but a single child was all her womb could bear. She named the child Gabriel, the messenger of God, the interpreter of Daniel's visions.

At two o'clock they all realized it had been several minutes since anyone had seen him or heard his voice. A rapid search
of the safe house revealed no trace of him, and a call to his phone received no answer. Unit 8200 confirmed the device was
powered on and that it was moving through the Englischer Garten at a walking pace. Eli Lavon was confident he knew where it
was headed. The child of Irene Frankel wanted to see where it had happened. Lavon couldn't blame him. He was suffering from
the same malady.